Author: Paul Deaton

Categories
Environment

Earth Day 2023

Trail walking at Lake Macbride State Park on April 21, 2023.

There is an official Earth Day website which indicates how far the observance has come since 1970. In addition, there are proclamations by governing bodies, festivals supporting “Mother Earth,” and oil and gas companies touting their actions to capture CO2 emissions and recycle plastics. I’m not sure any of this helps reduce the impact of humans on our shared environment, yet it may be better than a stick in the eye.

Exploitation of the environment has been basic to civilization, especially in the settling of North America. In the early days, North America was about land speculation and extraction of wealth from the so-called “newly discovered” place. It began with production of sugar, rice, cotton, tobacco and indigo, which required cheap land and abundant labor in the form of slaves or indigent white folks forced to migrate from Britain. We had and continue to operate an extractive economy supporting exports and consumers. Few want to give up their handheld mobile device or other modern conveniences to help save the planet, so the extraction part of the economy may grow along with the burgeoning population. By 2100 there are projected to be 10.4 billion people on our blue-green sphere, according to the United Nations.

People should do more to improve the environment than what each of us can do individually. It seems obvious that everyone: every business, organization, government, and individual must pull together to solve the climate crisis. Importantly, our political system must take the lead in climate action, regardless of the political outlook of individual elected officials. This holds true in authoritarian regimes where there are no elected representatives. When I wrote “everyone,” that’s what I meant.

What should we do? That’s an easy answer: support large scale, organized actions that will make a difference. If regulators say we should reduce CO2 emissions in new automotive products, then support it. If the Gulf of Mexico dead zones are a problem, then regulate the chemicals and processes that dump into the Mississippi River watershed. If our air is polluted by emissions from coal and natural gas-powered electricity generation, then convert to wind and solar. Solutions exist to clean up our air, water and land pollution. There are processes to develop new and better solutions to the climate crisis.

Every day I do something small to help mitigate the worst effects of the climate crisis. I reduce water usage, adjust the thermostat a few degrees, turn off lights when not in a room, and minimize the amount of driving I do in our personal vehicle. Every day is Earth Day in our home, so the annual remembrance is not that important to me. What matters more is finding common ground to enable more solutions, reduce pollution, and clean up our land, air and water.

Spend a few minutes reading the Earth Day website, located here. Then talk to someone you know about how important it is we take action today to rescue our much abused planet and make a livable home for our civilization going forward. It could make our lives better in the process.

Categories
Living in Society

Trash Talk

Iowa State Capitol.

Republicans in the Iowa legislature are treating children like trash. It is part of their view of the role of children in society. It is not right.

Republicans embrace our forefathers, and seek to make Iowa and America great. They don’t want to hear alternative views of American history, like those presented in The 1619 Project created by Nikole Hannah-Jones of Waterloo. They also don’t want to go back to our founding in 16th Century Britain, although that’s where we seem to find ourselves today.

Today’s Republicans embrace the worst aspects of 16th Century colonization, including the idea of Richard Hakluyt that children of the poor be “brought up in labor and work” so they would not follow in their parents’ footsteps and become “idle rogues.” These Republicans are no different than the British elite who had never set foot in the Americas as they rounded up the poor, indigent, and criminal, as well as children, to send to North America and return riches made with the sweat of their brows.

When I woke at 3 a.m. this morning the Iowa Senate was deadlocked over Senate File 542, a bill to roll back protections for children against inappropriate types and amounts of labor. The bill was written by the governor and a small coterie of restaurant and retail establishment lobbyists seeking to resolve Iowa’s labor shortage. Deadlock was related to the spoken intent of the bill. Republicans didn’t want to say anything about their intent, so they refused to answer direct questions about the bill during debate. This is behavior unworthy of their oath of office.

I worked on the cleanup crew of a large slaughterhouse as an adult, and it’s no place for children regardless of the law. This is common sense.

Children are not something to be used up and thrown into the garbage. Yet that is the effect this legislation could have. Republicans frame this as learning the responsibility to work and saving a little money for higher education or other advancement of personal goals. I see it for what it is: a chance to indoctrinate children to do the bidding of the wealthiest among us and in doing so, give up part of their childhood.

No matter how you look at it, it is a raw deal for children when they are treated like expendable commodities. The Iowa House will debate this bill next.

Categories
Sustainability

Onion Planting 2023

Onion plot 2023.

It was 64 degrees at 3 a.m. Saturday morning. That’s weird.

A gardener contends with weather, so temperature anomalies come with the work. The vegetables I plant in my Midwestern garden have a wide range of tolerance to climate, moisture and light. They have been bred and propagated because of those qualities.

Potatoes and onions should be safe to plant now, and I did. I direct seeded spinach when putting in the onion sets. Garlic is doing fine after being uncovered from winter. There are many apple and pear blossoms in the early formation stage. Pollinators are already abundant, seeking the early purple flowers and dandelions in the lawn. The greenhouse is packed with seedlings. What could be wrong?

Regardless of weird weather, Spring has arrived and it would be difficult not to feel a part of it. I can see leaves on deciduous trees bud and burst into foliage in front of me. All is well in the garden, or at least as good as it gets.

What will weird weather mean this growing season? I don’t know. I am, however, both concerned, and getting used to it. The overall trend does not look good.

If you aren’t following Bill McKibben on the climate crisis, you likely should be. In yesterday’s edition of his substack, The Crucial Years, he wrote,

This week’s Fort Lauderdale rainstorm was, on the one hand, an utter freak of nature (storms ‘trained’ on the same small geography for hours on end, dropping 25 inches of rain in seven hours; the previous record for all of April was 19 inches) and on the other hand utterly predictable. Every degree Celsius that we warm the planet means the atmosphere holds more water vapor; as native Floridian and ace environmental reporter Dinah Voyles Pulver pointed out, “with temperatures in the Gulf running 3 to 4 degrees above normal recently, that’s at least 15% more rainfall piled up on top of a ‘normal’ storm.”

Get ready for far more of it; there are myriad scattered signs that we’re about to go into a phase of particularly steep climbs in global temperature. They’re likely to reach impressive new global records—and that’s certain to produce havoc we’ve not seen before.

The Crucial Years, We’re in for a stretch of heavy climate by Bill McKibben, April 15, 2023.

McKibben is not one to use hyperbole. He must realize the downside of doing so. In social media, instead of seeing McKibben’s work promoted, the right-wing spokesmodel for all things cultural was getting attention. Even climatologist and geophysicist Michael Mann snarked about the Georgia congresswoman’s comments.

It is getting difficult to follow the scientific discussion of the climate crisis. Partly, major news media find it too dull a subject for headlines. Partly, the right-wing media noise machine drowns out serious topics in public discourse. Yet we notice temperature anomalies when they happen, and wonder for how long we can go on the way we are.

While we wonder, we’ll need onions, apples and spinach.

Categories
Living in Society

We’re Going Home — Jim Schmidt

New Road, 1939 by Grant Wood.

When Jim Schmidt had a stroke 15 years ago, he was never the same. He almost died. Jim was one of a small number of people in this community of 7,000 with whom we could engage more deeply about intellectual matters. The stroke took that away from us. It hurt no less when he died on Friday, April 7, 2023.

Jim Schmidt’s obituary from the Cedar Rapids Gazette can be read here.

Part of Jim’s legacy was his analysis of the local terrain where Grant Wood painted New Road in 1939, with its mention of the City of Solon. The article, written by our mutual friend Janet Brown, was quite popular. It contributed to the Solon Public Library securing the rights to make prints and note cards of the image, and sell them to raise much needed funds for the library.

After so long, memories of our discussions faded. What remains important is we had those discussions, and for a while, had hope of making the world a better place. May his memory be a blessing.

Categories
Home Life

Iowa Spring – 2023 Edition

Trail walking on April 12, 2023.

My spouse and I noticed the mulberry tree on walkabout Tuesday afternoon.

The mulberry tree was damaged by the 2020 derecho and has begun to die. Branches high in the canopy are losing bark and not regrowing it. Soon it will need to be cut down and recycled. This is the only tree remaining from when we bought the lot in 1993.

We were discussing what to do with the yard. Mainly, we need to plant the area in front of the house where it was cleared last year. A flower bed of some kind will go there.

We took out the maple tree stump last year. We are considering replacement with some kind of tall bush rather than another tree, a forsythia or hydrangea, maybe.

More than half the Red Delicious apple tree is gone due to wind storms yet it seems very robust. Hard to tell if there will be an apple crop this year, yet under normal circumstances, there should be one.

Finally, the trays of seedlings are now outdoors in the greenhouse. It should be easier to water them. Next into the ground are onion sets, beets, and spinach. Hopefully there will be progress midst ambient temperatures in the 70s today.

Now to close this entry out and head for the lake trail for a morning walk.

Categories
Writing

8 Shelves of Poetry

Eight 23-inch shelves of poetry.

With enough perspective, the social importance of objects is diminished.

I’ve been inside the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor, and saw it up close. It’s name, “Liberty Enlightening the World,” by sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, simply states what it represents. Since installation it has come to mean more.

At the reopening after restoration of the statue, on July 3, 1986, President Ronald Reagan said, “…we celebrate this mother of exiles who lifts her light beside the golden door.” The golden door is a political addition, and not needed. It is a corruption. It permeates everything. It was only when I viewed the Statue of Liberty from Windows on the World atop the World Trade Center did I realize how imbued with cultural attachments it is. From my seat overlooking New York harbor, the statue seemed minuscule, less significant than the movement of boats under a clear night sky.

My belief about culture-imbued words used in poetry came from epiphanies like this. The best poets stay away from that kind of cultural insertion, instead using language to create meaning. My reading of poetry is a search for such verse, without culture bombs dropped into the text. It is hard to find.

The first books I bought after earning money delivering newspapers were collections of the poetry of Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg. I later added the poetry collection of W.B. Yeats. The books lay on a shelf at the M.L. Parker department store and spoke to me. I purchased them. Poetry did not become a key organizing principle for my home library, yet volumes were often available at a discount or given to me. The number of poetry books grew. Today, I have eight 23-inch shelves of poetry in my library.

In the late 1970s and ’80s I wrote poetry as a form of creative expression. Some of it was good, most wasn’t. A few have been posted here. It was a way to be a writer. There is a project of going through those pages, editing them and re-writing the poetry from today’s perspective. When I previously did that, results improved. There may be a book of poetry in me, yet I am a prose writer. I don’t often write it, yet do read poetry often.

Like everyone, I have favorites. I will go on reading Charles Bukowski until I’ve read every available verse. I only recently discovered Mary Oliver. Can you believe it? She’s among the best. Eventually I will get to Sven Armens’ two books purchased at a used bookstore in the county seat. Armens was my undergraduate Shakespeare teacher, a figure more suitable to being a character in Othello than poet or Shakespearean scholar. A reader needs to expand beyond favorites. That is the purpose of my eight shelves of poetry: be there when I need to consider language.

If I were a poet I would emulate characteristics of Vachel Lindsay, particularly his Rhymes to be Traded for Bread. Poetry as literal currency. I remember visiting the Vachel Lindsay house in Springfield, Illinois, and thinking how dull it must have been for Lindsay to be planted in a single location for any length of time. I see Lindsay walking into Kansas and other Midwestern places more than being planted in Springfield. I should return to reading Lindsay.

Having a wide selection of unread verse creates a go-to place when I’m stuck for what to read next. These going to poetry moments are unlikely to deliver me to re-reading Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen, yet maybe I should. The use of inventories in his writing has been influential in mine. Better to list the cultural attributes one seeks to invoke rather than assume readers will understand all the references in a single, culturally well-known object as an author hopes.

A writer has to use nouns, dammit! Better that verse explores the meaning of nouns. I would rather poetry be all verbs, suggesting action and an ever-evolving thought process. One can’t escape the nouns, though. I’m not hopeful I’ll find such verse in my eight shelves of poetry. I plan to continue the search, a couple of volumes each month.

Categories
Living in Society

Political Landscape

Ben Keiffer (L) and Dr. Christopher Peters chatting at Pints and Politics event, Thursday, Aug. 9, 2018

I hope the procession of deaths of friends and acquaintances will give it a rest for a while. I need to think about other things, namely gardening, cooking, writing, reading, and to some extent, politics. That last one sticks in my craw.

My new process of saving political newsletters to read over each weekend is working well to offload worries about political life. Better to save them and review all at once, I thought. The decision made me more productive during the week. I can see which elected officials are doing the work and which are phoning it in.

One newsletter stands out. Brad Sherman, my representative’s newsletter, sent from his campaign website. Sherman is a fringe member of political society. As a preacher, he is also on the fringe of nondenominational congregations. I compare him to other Republicans I’ve known and he doesn’t seem to work at getting to know constituents except those that produce a vote for him. Not only is Sherman on the fringe, he is plain weird. I gain insight into the weird at the expense of foregoing my priorities for state government. It is an unsavory dish to swallow.

Sherman won the election fair and square, even beating the Democrat in typically liberal Johnson County. We’re stuck with him until 2024, although depressed voter turnout and lack of interest in politics may be his ticket to reelection.

What don’t I like about him? In his last newsletter he wrote,

It has become obvious, for anyone who is not under the spell of the corrupt mainstream media, that Donald Trump won the 2020 election. Election fraud is now out in the open and it is time for it to be dealt with. And if the 2020 election was fraudulent, then Donald Trump is the rightful president, and we must insist that this gets fixed!

Brad Sherman legislative newsletter, April 6, 2023

It is tedious to mention Joe Biden won the 2020 general election for president the same way Sherman did, fair and square. I won’t be taking that up with him as he is off in the deep end. I don’t want to get dragged down with him as I have gardening and other things to do, as mentioned. Whether electing a Democrat in this district is possible is an open question. My sense is few people are paying attention to politics these days.

Iowa Democrats are in transition, as is the entirety of the state.

Much has been made this news cycle of the 565,000 registered Iowa voters who didn’t vote in the 2022 midterm elections. Secretary of State Paul Pate is sending letters to them all to receive confirmation they want to remain on the rolls. No response, you are purged in 2026. Yes Republicans are working to purge voters from the rolls. My comment is a little different. Did Democrats really leave 565,000 votes on the table in 2022? I believe Obama 2008 would never have left that many fish in the pond. My take is sloth set in.

Democrats have a lot of plans, and maybe that’s part of the problem. Centralized thinking about winning elections hasn’t worked for a long time, likely since the big wins in 2006 when the electorate decided they’d had it with George W. Bush and Republicans more generally. The worm has turned now.

My experience during the 2022 cycle was there were very few active Democrats in the nine Johnson County precincts in House District 91. Most have trouble filling two seats on the county central committee, let alone doing much during GOTV in the run up to the election. Partly, this is apathy, but partly the Democratic Party. More than apathy, Democrats have lost the relevance of which they are continuously reminding us. Other factors play more important roles in people’s lives. Politics is not high on the list of what is important.

Iowans are amenable to collective thought, and that serves Republicans. Farmers alone have to listen to bankers, equipment dealers, chemical companies, seed companies, and people who make a market in the commodities they grow. Without being collective farms, farmers act like them voluntarily because it serves their best interests to conform to the demands of people and organizations they rely upon. Evidence of the success of our form of agriculture is that millions of people haven’t died of hunger as they did in the hey day of collective farms in the Soviet Union.

It’s been a couple days since one of my friends and acquaintances died. Let’s see if we can go a few weeks before there is another. In the meanwhile, I’m keeping politics on the back burner.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Garden 2023

Potatoes planted on Good Friday, April 7, 2023.

Gardening began in the traditional way, with onions planted indoors beginning in December, and seed potatoes planted on Good Friday. Fourteen trays of seedlings are either on a table near the French doors or under a grow light downstairs. As soon as I can get the greenhouse assembled, cruciferous vegetables will head out there. Onion sets arrived Thursday and need to go right into the ground. Chives from last year are up and garlic is poking through the leaf mulch that covered them since October. Once again, I’m committed to raising food in 2023.

I plan to reduce the number of varieties of what I grow and grow more of it. The idea is to use or preserve what we can and donate the extras to the local food pantry. This year, the volume of clients visiting food pantries has risen significantly. We each must help how we can.

I need to make a trip to Monticello to buy fertilizer. It will be the same 50-pound bags of composted chicken manure that have become standard. I also need to visit Beautiful Land Products in Tipton and pick up a couple of bags of soil mix. I think I’m good for fencing this year, so it may be a low capital garden. I need one of those.

I will likely be sore in the morning, yet I relish the fresh air and sunshine. As we age, it is important to stay active. Gardening can be done at whatever pace we choose. Cheers to Garden 2023!

Categories
Living in Society

Stormy Weather

Screenshot of weather forecast on April 4, 2023.

Iowa Valley Habitat for Humanity reported their warehouse in Iowa City was destroyed by a tornado. They sent this email yesterday:

As a result of the March 31 storms that brought tornadoes through towns across Eastern Iowa, our 5,760 square foot warehouse used as the main storage space for our construction tools, supplies, materials, safety equipment, vehicles, trailers – everything necessary to build and repair homes – is a total loss. At this time, we have no plans to stop building and improving homes, especially now that our neighbors impacted by the storms are in need of home repairs. To continue this critical work without interruption in our services, IVHFH is looking to the support of the Iowa Valley community to raise funds and rebuild the Habitat warehouse.

Habitat for Humanity is an organization full of good people and volunteers doing good work. I volunteered on a couple of projects and the spirit of teamwork is infectious. If you can help them, they made a website to donate or volunteer here.

Even though the main lines of storms blew through here during the last five days, we were unscathed.

My first weather learning experience was in the military. When traveling around West Germany in formations of armored, tracked vehicles, both current and forecast weather mattered a lot to operations. Weather reports came down from on high, although from how far up the chain of command, I’m not sure. I remember being near Baumholder, in a tent on a hill, with 20 degree below zero ambient temperatures. The S-2 intelligence officer cradled a telephone receiver in a machine that wrote a facsimile of weather maps on a roll of thermal paper. Mostly, we were interested in precipitation forecasts before maneuvers.

Ever since, I tried to learn about weather forecasting in a basic human way.

The amount and types of free weather information available today is remarkable. It is also easy to use. Once one understands prevailing wind direction and how to read a radar map, it is relatively easy to plan around storms. The more I look at actual weather and compare it to radar, I gain a sense of how the large bodies of water around us impact storms. This is particularly useful when a storm is coming and the lawn needs mowing. A few clicks of a mouse on the computer screen and a person will have a good idea whether an hour’s outdoors work can be finished before rain falls. It’s a great feeling to see the first raindrops just as mowing is finished and I’m heading for the garage.

We have a safe place on the lower level of our home where multiple load-bearing walls intersect. When a big storm is coming, we move a chair there and bring a laptop to follow the storm. We don’t have a permanent space, like a storm cellar and don’t need one.

If you can spare some change, I hope you will help Habitat for Humanity rebuild their warehouse. Here’s the link.

Categories
Living in Society

Ready for Spring

By the calendar it is spring, yet it doesn’t quite feel like it. Too much darkness, too much rain, and too cold temperatures. Things will break, yet that doesn’t help get through today.

Monday I stopped at my parents’ graves while on my way to the wake for a friend. The dirt on Mother’s grave settled in the three and a half years since she was buried. I don’t know if the cemetery takes care of that, or whether I should bring a couple bags of topsoil, grass seed, a rake, a pair of gloves, and build it up myself. Whatever I do would be converted to the cemetery standard in time. It may not matter over the long term, although I’d feel better after tending her grave.

There have been enough funerals for a while. It is convenient to watch some from a distance via streaming. We don’t get the benefit of fellowship when we attend that way. I knew a lot of people at my friend’s in person wake, so that was pretty satisfying. I’m ready for what’s next and if spring would arrive, that would be it.

I didn’t know what to expect with Christopher Isett and Stephen Miller’s The Social History of Agriculture: From the Origins to the Current Crisis., yet it is slow reading as I drag my way through peasantry, indentured servitude, slavery and variations of people farming for little or no money. It seems a necessary background and the previous half dozen books were easier to read and more enjoyable. I’m halfway finished. Time to hunker down and finish it as there is valuable information therein. With gathering darkness and storms outside, what else is there to do?

It’s been a punk day for weather with me feeling under the weather. We have plenty of COVID-19 test kits, yet I’m confident that is not the problem. I’m okay with a bit of mystery. Soon enough spring will be here.

Probably time to get out William Carlos Williams and re-read Spring and All. Few things cheer me up like his writing.